Either way, it's history in the making

AUSTRALIA today will dismiss its second-longest serving prime
minister, according to all available omens, with only the size of
the margin in question.

"The average of the polls over the last month points to a
landslide, whereas the betting market suggests Labor just tipping
over the line," summarised the Australian National University's Dr
Andrew Leigh.

The average polling result during the course of the campaign was
a Labor win with 55 per cent of the two-party preferred vote,
implying a swing against the Government since the last election of
a crushing 8 per cent.

The biggest swing against a sitting government since 1949 was
7.4 per cent. Labor needs 16 seats to form a majority government,
which requires a notional uniform swing of 4.8 per cent.

The betting markets give Labor odds of about 3 in 4 of victory
today, with a total of about $7 million riding on the outcome. This
makes the election the third-biggest betting event in the country,
after the Melbourne Cup and the Australian Open tennis, said
Centrebet's Neil Evans.

The downfall of the Howard Government would be a political event
of international significance. "Howard is the most successful
Western statesman in the world for the last 15 years," said one of
the world's leading conservative political philosophers, Francis
Fukuyama.

The odds of the Prime Minister losing his seat of Bennelong have
increased during the election campaign, and rose again yesterday.
The Centrebet odds late yesterday assigned a 46 per cent likelihood
that he would lose his seat, which would make him the first sitting
prime minister to do so since 1929, when Stanley Melbourne Bruce
was humiliated after attempting radical change to the industrial
relations laws.

Whatever the outcome today, it will be a unique election result.
If the Howard Government loses, it will be the first time that a
federal government has been rejected during a period of strong
economic conditions, said HSBC's economist, John Edwards.

It would mark the fist time in the history of opinion polling
that the party favoured as the better economic manager should lose,
said the former head of Newspoll, Sol Lebovic.

"To me, it's the mystery of the campaign," Mr Lebovic said. "It
means that something in the electorate has changed."

A Kevin Rudd ascendancy would give Labor a monopoly of power at
the state and national level, wall-to-wall Labor, for the first
time in the country's history.

And, obversely, it would represent an unprecedented wipe-out of
the Liberal Party. Its most senior elected official would be the
Lord Mayor of Brisbane, Campbell Newman.

"This would also raise some very serious questions about how the
party could be rejuvenated, some would question, even survive," a
former Liberal leader, John Hewson, wrote in The Australian
Financial Review yesterday.

But if the Howard Government should defy the odds and manage to
cling to power, it would be an unprecedented recovery, Mr Lebovic
said. "The biggest comeback so far was in 2004 when John Howard
came back by 5.5 percentage points in the course of the campaign.
If he gets back, it's historic."

The final brace of opinion polls in the last two days was
unanimous for a Labor victory, but with a wide variation from the
Herald/Nielsen poll's 57 per cent for Labor to Newspoll's 52
per cent.